Social factors involved in the control of impulsiveness were examined in domestic chicks. In binary choices between a large/long-delay option (LL) and a small/short-delay alternative (SS), chicks that had been competitively trained in groups of three individuals showed fewer choices of LL than did those trained in isolation (experiment 1), suggesting that competition causes impulsive choice. In experiment 2, in order to identify the critical factor involved, we tested the effects of perceived competition (coincident feeding without interruption) and scrounging (gaining food without pecking bead) separately. To examine the effects of risk/noise that individual chicks experienced in competition, the food amount varied randomly in trials according to a binomial distribution around the expected mean. Perceived competition primarily contributed to the influence on the impulsive choice, whereas the contribution of scrounging was weaker. Collection risk did not explain the social influences since the perceived competition was not accompanied by actual interruption of the delayed food reward. The risk owing to variable food per se did not cause impulsive choices. Coincident foraging during competition is thought to play a critical role.

Women's basal body temperature (BBT) shows a periodic pattern that associates with menstrual cycle. Although this fact suggests a possibility that daily BBT time series can be useful for estimating the underlying phase state as well as for predicting the length of current menstrual cycle, little attention has been paid to model BBT time series. In this study, we propose a state‐space model that involves the menstrual phase as a latent state variable to explain the daily fluctuation of BBT and the menstruation cycle length. Conditional distributions of the phase are obtained by using sequential Bayesian filtering techniques. A predictive distribution of the next menstruation day can be derived based on this conditional distribution and the model, leading to a novel statistical framework that provides a sequentially updated prediction for upcoming menstruation day. We applied this framework to a real data set of women's BBT and menstruation days and compared prediction accuracy of the proposed method with that of previous methods, showing that the proposed method generally provides a better prediction. Because BBT can be obtained with relatively small cost and effort, the proposed method can be useful for women's health management. Potential extensions of this framework as the basis of modeling and predicting events that are associated with the menstrual cycles are discussed. © 2017 The Authors. Statistics in Medicine Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Risk aversion occurred when food amount varied, whereas consistent risk sensitivity was not found when the delay varied; amount and delay were not interchangeable.Choices are thus deviated from those predicted as optima. Instead, factors such as amount, delay and consumption time could be separately represented and processed to yield economically sub-optimal choices.

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For animals to decide which prey to attack, the gain and delay of the food item must be integrated in a value function. However, the subjective value is not obtained by expected profitability when it is accompanied by risk. To estimate the subjective value, we examined choices in a cross-shaped maze with two colored feeders in domestic chicks. When tested by a reversal in food amount or delay, chicks changed choices similarly in both conditions (experiment 1). We therefore examined risk sensitivity for amount and delay (experiment 2) by supplying one feeder with food of fixed profitability and the alternative feeder with high-or low-profitability food at equal probability. Profitability varied in amount (groups 1 and 2 at high and low variance) or in delay (group 3). To find the equilibrium, the amount (groups 1 and 2) or delay (group 3) of the food in the fixed feeder was adjusted in a total of 18 blocks. The Markov chain Monte Carlo method was applied to a hierarchical Bayesian model to estimate the subjective value. Chicks undervalued the variable feeder in group 1 and were indifferent in group 2, but overvalued the variable feeder in group 3 at a population level. Re-examination without the titration procedure (experiment 3) suggested that the subjective value was not absolute for each option. When the delay was varied, the variable option was often given a paradoxically high value depending on fixed alternative. Therefore, the basic assumption of the uniquely determined value function might be questioned.3